Use a Professional Email Address

November 19, 2014

A lack of trust and perceived professionalism can directly translate to lost revenue.

There are lots of ways you’ve worked to build a positive brand and inspire trust with your clients. Pleasant phone greetings when client calls in, a professional sign over the office entrance, even stationary on a nice paper stock are important to let your clients know that you’re serious about your business.

But what about using your own domain name for your email address?

How does it look after a great conversation with a potential customer when you hand them your card and the email address you expect to have important business conversations with ends with @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com, or @aol.com?

Put another way, imagine receiving a message from a lawyer with an email address of lawyerjohn36@hotmail.com. Do you think John’s clients would be comfortable knowing that private correspondence with their consultant was being transmitted through a free email service? How would your perception change if John’s email were john@smithconsulting.com?

Professional branding aside, there are some great reasons to have your email at your own domain name for business email:

Who’s going to help? Delete an important email? Can’t log in to your account? Have a question about the number of emails you can send from your account? The free email service providers have self-service tools to help you figure out your problem, but what can you do if you still have a problem? Who will you talk to and how long will you have to wait for help?

Will your emails be delivered? “I didn’t receive your email”. Does this sound familiar? Free email accounts are very popular with spammers. Did you know that some mail services started blocking mass mail delivery from free email accounts with these domain names?

The switching cost to a domain-based email address later is higher. There’s a strong benefit to having people know where to find you. Changing your email address can be a lot like a retailer relocating. All the business built over the years could disappear, as customers can no longer find you at the address.

Unintended communication could be embarrassing, even damaging. Jon Smith is our hypothetical accountant with a free GMail account at jon.smith@gmail.com. Can you guess the number of times his clients have emailed their sensitive financial documents (even tax returns) to john.smith@gmail.com? Sure, it’s the client’s fault for the mistake, but could this have been prevented if he were Jon@ReliableAccountants.com?

What happens when they’re no longer around? Although its less likely a Google, or a Yahoo will go out of business, how often have you had to change an ISP provided email address because you switched ISPs (like from smith@earthlink.net to smith@charter.net)? Not only do you need to change business cards, etc, you’ll be losing any email delivered to the old address.

Free email accounts are very popular these days. But if you’re serious about your business and your brand, it might be time to consider how current and potential clients are judging you by a simple email address.

But you may be asking:

What do I do with all my email history? You might be thinking, “I have years of correspondence in my Yahoo, or AOL account. I don’t want to loose all that history”. There are usually ways to transfer old email between providers. We’ll work with you to figure out the best way.

But what if I want to access my email from anywhere? One of the biggest conveniences of modern free webmail is you want walk up to any computer and get access to your email if you have to. Our email system has a great secure webmail interface that allows you to do the same.

Email is so complicated, I like to just keep it simple. Why should I hassle? We know how complicated email can be. We’ll take care of all the setup for you, and for the things we can’t access, we’ll walk you through it step by step.